


What Song Does the River Sing?

by JHSC



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Author is OK with this fact, Author still has not seen Endgame, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Emotional Hurt, Hurt very little comfort, M/M, Steve throws rocks and thinks about his mistakes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-16 15:03:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21038165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JHSC/pseuds/JHSC
Summary: There are no mountains out here that he can throw himself at. No bullies he can lure into an alley for a fight, no enemies he can take down with not inconsiderable force. Just trees. Vines. Slender saplings and giant, rooted kapoks. And up ahead, the glimmer of a river, wending its way through the countryside.Steve reaches its banks, and stops.





	What Song Does the River Sing?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nendian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nendian/gifts).

> _Standing on the dream bridge half awake_  
_With night in its terrible robes_  
_Of moonlight and black cloud,_  
_I see a head floating by._  
_Why, with a smile on its face?_  
_What song does the river sing?_  
\--"Heads Will Roll," Rodger Kamenetz

*

There once was a man who…

No.

There once was a woman.

There once was a woman who lived and worked and ate and slept and laughed and loved and was loved and died. There once was a woman who lived and died, but died before her time. Because of a mountain. There once was a woman who fell sick, but there was a mountain between her village and the nearest hospital, and traveling around it took too many days.

And so she died.

There once was a woman who lived and loved and died, and after her death, every day for the next twenty years, her husband took an axe to the mountain. Every day for twenty years, he threw the axe and himself at the mountain, until the rock was chipped and crumbled and crushed and hauled away and in its place was a road. Straight from his village to the hospital.

There once was a woman with so much love, her husband tore down a mountain for her.

Steve thinks he knows how that feels. Like he could spend the rest of his life ripping apart granite and gneiss with his bare hands, crushing boulders into gravel and peeling sheets of slate and shale apart layer by layer by layer.

“I can't trust my own mind,” Bucky admits, meeting Steve’s eyes -- not looking at his forehead or chin or just past his left shoulder, but actually meeting his eyes for the first time since the fight on the helicarrier, eight-hundred days ago -- and the simple glance makes something in Steve’s heart crack. “So, until they figure out how to get this stuff out of my head, I think going back under is the best thing, for everybody.”

Steve nods, because there’s nothing else to say. He watches Bucky’s body go into the chamber, watches as he’s surrounded in frozen mist, watches as his heart stops beating and his lungs stop breathing and the millions of firing neurons in his brain shut down one by one. Not awake, but not asleep. Not alive, but not dead. Somehow straddling the intersection of both and neither.

He wants to pull the chamber apart piece by piece. Until nothing is left but shards of glass and crushed shrapnel. That’s what he wants, but it’s not what Bucky needs. So instead he leaves the room, and then the building, and he walks until he reaches the edge of the city and steps into the jungle beyond.

Two members of the Dora Milaje keep pace with him, one about five hundred yards to the south, the other the same distance east. He doesn’t care. He walks until the sounds of civilization fade away, and all he can hear is the wind in the trees, the buzzing of insects and the calls of wildlife both feathered and furred.

There are no mountains out here that he can throw himself at. No bullies he can lure into an alley for a fight, no enemies he can take down with not inconsiderable force. Just trees. Vines. Slender saplings and giant, rooted kapoks. And up ahead, the glimmer of a river, wending its way through the countryside.

Steve reaches its banks, and stops.

*

Steve trained himself to stop flinching by the time he was thirteen years old.

After all, the bullies loved a good flinch. They’d go out of their way to draw one out: throwing punches that stopped just a hair short of his temple, lunging at him only to pull back at the last possible second. Seeing the flinch was even better than seeing blood.

So Steve learned not to flinch, not to cry out, not to show fear or pain, not to give them that satisfaction. He’d wait for them to dive at him, and then he’d go down swinging, fists clenched and angry.

Robbed of the flinch, the bullies were satisfied to draw blood instead.

*

“Bucky, Bucky, there are men laying down their lives,” Steve said, trying not to look at Bucky’s uniform, trying to ignore the fact that tomorrow Bucky would get on a boat to Europe to lay down his own life, if he must. “I got no right to do any less than them. That’s what you don’t understand. This isn’t about me.”

“Right,” Bucky said shortly, the echo of a thousand arguments coloring his tone. “Cause you got nothing to prove.”

Bucky sighed, and Steve sighed with him -- one last breath, together. One last argument resolved with an exhalation of air, a shake of the head, and the mutual thought, _God, what am I going to do with you?_

Maybe Steve did have something to prove: to the bullies, to himself, to Bucky. That the world’s a mess, and he could do something, something tangible, something _real_, to help fix it. That he didn’t have to resign himself to the small space the world had told him time and time again was the only place where he could fit. He knew, could feel in his bones, that he could do more to help than collect scrap metal and raise money for the war effort. And it’d be irresponsible of him, _wrong_ of him, to settle for that. To not do more.

And if doing more meant punching the biggest bullies in the Northern Hemisphere, well. Steve wouldn’t say no.

*

Steve screamed just once, inside the machine. And then he pulled it back. Buried it down. Endured the needles and the blinding light and the sensation like his flesh was ripping itself from his bones because they’d stop the procedure and he’d lose his chance. He screamed once, and didn’t scream again.

*

Steve doesn’t scream. The Wakandan warriors will hear him and come running, asking questions and making judgments, pitying him and coddling him and walking him gently back to T’Challa’s palatial paradise, where everyone will continue to be kind and gentle and understanding.

Steve used to come home at night with blood on his teeth and his knuckles. Ma would fill a basin with too-hot water and scrub out his wounds with a too-rough cloth, all the while cussing him out in a harsh brogue. Then she’d rub the back of his neck so hard all the tension in his muscles would release in a fiery spasm, and he would feel better, and he would feel loved.

Among the Wakandans, a guest in their midst, he can’t bear their kindness, their gentleness. It doesn’t debride. Doesn’t cleanse his head or his heart or his hands of gravel and debris. Just leaves him tense and aching, and missing his Ma harder than ever.

*

“The world has changed and none of us can go back,” Peggy said, for the first time, for the hundredth time, because she might not remember their conversations from visit to visit, but by God, she knew Steve. “All we can do is our best, and sometimes the best that we can do is to start over.”

She knew Steve. Was the only person left in the world who knew Steve before he changed, before he won his new body and lost his old one, before he lost Erskine, lost Bucky, lost the Commandos and Phillips and his neighbors and his classmates and his whole, whole world, a piece of him torn away with every death, until nothing was left except for a shell, except for his new, new body.

Peggy had known him when he was whole. Sometimes she treated him like he still was.

*

Steve crouches down and picks up a rock. It’s the size of his fist, rough and striated with flakes of color: grey and turquoise and gold. He launches it at the water. Listens to the splash, watches the spray fall back down onto the calm surface of the river, sending out hundreds of tiny ripples.

He bends down for another rock.

*

“Let me move in with you,” Bucky said, and Steve told him no.

“Let my folks give you a ride,” Bucky said, and Steve told him no.

“Let’s take the girls dancing,” Bucky said, and Steve told him no.

“Just go! Get out of here!” Steve said, and Bucky said no.

*

He throws the second rock harder than the first, is reaching down for a third before it even hits the water.

*

“I think going back under is the best thing... for everybody,” Bucky said, and Steve said nothing.

*

He throws and he throws and he throws, digging into the soft mud of the riverbank, digging and searching and grasping and throwing.

*

“--The best that we can do is to start over.”

*

“--The best thing... for everybody.”

*

Mud cakes his hands, coats his arms up to the elbows, soaks through the knees of his pants. He keeps waiting for one of the Dora to say something. He keeps waiting for someone to stop him from destroying this idyllic waterfront. He keeps waiting for someone to argue with him, to fight with him, to raise their gauntlet against him, and he won’t flinch.

He won’t flinch.

*

“--The best that we can do...”

*

“--The best thing...”

*

Steve falls to his knees, spent. Digs his fingers into the soil like it can ground him, can comfort him, can touch him back and rub his neck and wrap around him as he thinks about Bucky in the chair and thinks about Bucky in the cell and in the tank, in the center of a Bucharest apartment denying him, denying their relationship, denying their life together like it was nothing, nothing.

And like lightning it hits him, like lightning the realization surges through him, the sure knowledge that he has been wrong this whole time, has been wrong since day one, and every minute that he fought was a minute he spent being a colossal idiot.

Bucky was right not to trust him. 

Their whole lives, he hadn’t been fair to Bucky. Hadn’t been kind. Had taken for granted that Bucky would keep offering, keep asking, keep giving -- no matter that Steve never gave anything back. He’d taken for granted that Bucky would always be there.

And then he wasn’t.

And then he wasn’t not there, wasn’t dead, but wasn’t at Steve’s side, pushing and prodding and reaching and trying. He wasn’t dead, but he was hiding. Avoiding. Rejecting. And Steve finally, finally, got a taste of how that felt.

Their whole lives, he had _known_ that Bucky would always be there for him, reaching for him.

It took seventy years for Steve to realize he’d never once been the one to reach out first.

*

“--The best that we can do...”

*

“--The best thing...”

*

No one is coming.

Steve sits down on the disturbed ground and realizes: no one is coming. Tony isn’t going to taunt him off of this riverbank, Sam isn’t going to pull him away from the water, Bucky isn’t going to cajole him to get up, Peggy isn’t going to tsk at him, Ma isn’t going to scold him over the state of his clothes and scrub his hands with a rough brush until he’s squeaky clean and satisfied.

Tony is in the wind, Sam is on the Raft, Bucky is in the ice, and Peggy and Ma are dead.

No one is going to tell him what to do.

He sits, and he stares out at the water until the light changes, fades from blue into yellow into blood orange into night, and the stars of the southern hemisphere slowly blink into sight, one by one.

*

“--The best thing you can do...”

*

The breeze picks up, and the clouds start to roll in from the east.

Steve stands. Brushes the now-dried mud off his hands and his arms. Wipes his damp eyes with the hem of his t-shirt. Turns away from the water and back down the path that led him here.

He can’t fight the wind. Can’t fight the river. Can’t fight the mountain, or the ice -- not with his bare hands, no matter how much he may want to. He fights the memory of a dozen punching bags bursting at the seams, pouring sand out like blood onto the gym floor, unsatisfying, ineffective. Punching the bags and punching Tony and punching the river -- none of it’s helped. None of it.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is change.

*

In the morning, T’Challa loans him a jet, and a pilot, and gear, and coordinates where he can meet up with Nat in three hours so they can launch their rescue mission in six.

Steve showers off the river mud.

He gears up.

And then he goes down to the medical wing and looks. Looks at the cryo chamber he wants to tear apart. Looks at the man he wants to put back together with his bare hands. Looks at his own reflection in the glass, thinks about what he has to do, what he has to change, to become a person who reaches out first.

He leaves the note in an envelope, tucked in a notch at the side of the machine, where it won’t be overlooked but won’t get in the way, and he brushes his fingers across the glass, like a touch, like a kiss, and then he leaves.

*

_I’ve gone to clean up my mess. When I get back, can I stay with you till the end of the line?_

*

There once was a man.

There once was a man who lived and worked and ate and slept and laughed and loved and was loved, who fought and fell and fled and flinched away.

And Steve will spend a year, twenty years, building a road back to him.

*

**Author's Note:**

> For Nend, who is a mensch.
> 
> (Quick reminder: I love comments. I love them so... SO much.....)


End file.
